Saturday, July 28, 2007

I've moved! This site is no longer being updated. Please head over to www.lookspring.co.uk instead, and update your bookmarks. Thanks.

Re-reading this old post (it's not vanity, it's self-improvement) reminded me that the researchers from the BBFC were also on the receiving end of my Syriana rant, which made it in to their report on why gamers like games. If you want to see just how much more rambling and garbled I am in speech rather than on paper, you can compare and contrast on p83. The rest of it is much more worthy of a read.

Re-reading its conclusions (summarised here) makes an interesting backdrop for the more recent Manhunt 2 fuss, which the board refused classification, effectively preventing its sale in the UK.

Here's BBFC's director David Cooke's response to the research:

People who do not play games raise concerns about their engrossing nature, assuming that players are also emotionally engrossed. This research suggests the opposite; a range of factors seems to make them less emotionally involving than film or television. The adversaries which players have to eliminate have no personality and so are not real and their destruction is therefore not real, regardless of how violent that destruction might be. This firm grasp on reality seems to extend to younger players, but this is no reason to allow them access to adult rated games, as they themselves often admit that they find the violence in games like Manhunt very upsetting.

And here's his response, two month later, to Manhunt 2:

Manhunt 2 is distinguishable from recent high-end video games by its unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone in an overall game context which constantly encourages visceral killing with exceptionally little alleviation or distancing... There is sustained and cumulative casual sadism in the way in which these killings are committed, and encouraged, in the game... Although the difference should not be exaggerated the fact of the game’s unrelenting focus on stalking and brutal slaying and the sheer lack of alternative pleasures on offer to the gamer, together with the different overall narrative context, contribute towards differentiating this submission from the original Manhunt game.Against this background, the Board’s carefully considered view is that to issue a certificate to Manhunt 2, on either platform, would involve a range of unjustifiable harm risks, to both adults and minors, within the terms of the Video Recordings Act, and accordingly that its availability, even if statutorily confined to adults, would be unacceptable to the public.

The disparity between those two stances makes me angry, but thinking about why it makes me angry has made me happy. I'm angry because the reasoning for the rejection is the kind of paternalistic, interventionalist patter which always gets me hot under the collar. But that means what makes me frustrated about this decision is not videogames being scapegoated, misunderstood or persecuted, but the usual, unresolvable objections to censorship in general. Cooke isn't saying that Manhunt is especially dangerous because it's a game, he's just saying - as he is called upon to do with all the material the BBFC examines - that he thinks we'd all be better off without it. And he could well be right. From what I've seen of Manhunt 2 (which isn't much, but might be more than the BBFC's 34mins 43s), it's lost the sharp moral focus that made the original so compellingly uncomfortable, and that means that all you're left with is the shlock.

But does rejecting it on those terms mean we're still left with a double standard between what's judged acceptable for game violence and film violence? Absolutely. But for all my free speech posturing, I can't help but wish we'd drawn the line for film somewhere before we hit Hostel II, on whose relentlessly nasty 8462 feet (and 12 frames) the BBFC didn't inflict a single cut. How much will we really lose by calling a halt to gaming's love affair with mindless (rather than mindful, a distinction the BBFC has shown itself well able to make) violence here?

Friday, July 27, 2007

I've moved! This site is no longer being updated. Please head over to www.lookspring.co.uk instead, and update your bookmarks. Thanks.

I've moved house five times in the last five years. The thing I seem most prone to losing, which you may consider more carelessness than misfortune, is washing machines. But alongside the more major traumas of slipped discs, dropped vases and abandoned trampettes, it's the little things that cause the most hassle.

And tonight, as I try to reconstruct once again my gaming kit, that hassle is the discovery that I no longer own a single figure-of-eight power cord. How is it possible for any modern human being not to own a single figure-of-eight power cord? You get one free with every single thing you buy - consoles, battery chargers, printers, shoes, lottery tickets. If you're me, you hoard them, and label the plugs with white insulating tape and black marker pen, so your plug-boards read like shouty manifestos: CHARGE PS2 SPEAK TV PRINT CUBE! Words to live by, indeed.

But now I have none, which means buying one, which is an amazingly odd proposition. They're not products in their own right, surely. They're things that only come as adjuncts, like those white paper ties that come with sandwich bags. And isn't it immoral to be producing extra, retail cables when everyone (or everyone who hasn't moved five times in five years) has an abundance of them? They should have amnesty drop-boxes on street corners, where you can take them or leave them as your needs ebb and flow, like those smart new Parisian bikes. But they don't, and I don't, and so several thousand pounds worth of kit, hundreds of bits of processing power, and a few square feet of screen are currently nothing more than junk.

And as I sit here, with sweaty armpits and dusty knees, I swear to myself - as I have before, five times in five years - that I'll never do this again. That surely one day, eventually, I'll escape the Sisyphean tyranny of poking cables up the back of desks so that they can fall back down with a neat clunk as I emerge from under to try to catch them. I'll outgrow the anti-yoga of propping the bookcase up with one foot while hooking a crucial wire round the airborne corner with the other. I'll finally sleep the sound sleep of someone who doesn't have an eight-way plugged into a six way plugged into a splitter that doesn't have the right fuse now that I think about it.

And then I remember what a figure-of-eight cable looks like when you turn it on its side, and realise there is no end to this. Not ever.

About me

I'm a writer, mostly about games, previously as editor of Edge, and now under my own steam. This is my blog. It's also mostly about games. The idea was that it wouldn't be tedious or lame. Let me know how I'm doing.